04/12/25 United State of News

Another satirical roundup of the world's most talked about news.

This week -

Slippery Pete, 

AI Bubble Trouble, 

Sleeping Around.

Plus Bonus material

Budget Politicians 

Find us at comedypilotpresents.com

Buy Us a Coffee at buymeacoffee.com/comedypilotpresents

Transcript

Good evening. It’s the 4th December 2025 and this is the United State of News. I am Johnson Hood and these are the headlines.

·       Satan to receive a pardon from friend and mentor.

·       Far right nationalists defending the UK from foreign intruders decide against joining the military and hang flags instead.

·       Quentin Tarantino reveals his favourite film. It’s probably about women’s feet.

But first

The Whitehouse war on so-called narco-terrorists has strayed from Caribbean waters into hot water as Secretary of War, Pete ‘I didn’t do it’ Hegseth has been accused of war crimes.

The Washington Post reported that on 2nd September, a vessel was targeted by the US military with an initial strike, leaving two survivors clinging to the side of the boat. According to two independent sources, Pete then ordered a second strike, stating, ‘Kill them all.’ Despite the already murky legality of the operation, Article 3 of the Geneva Convention states, you can not hit someone out of combat, meaning once someone is down or injured, it is a war crime to target them with a second strike.

Pete took to social media to defend himself, claiming the Washington Post was ‘fake news’ and their feature was ‘fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory’ – something Pete knows all about having worked for Fox News.

He also said, ‘Biden coddled terrorists. We kill them.’ And to prove how serious he was about this, he posted a meme of Franklin the Turtle, a popular children’s cartoon character, firing a rocket launcher at brown people in a boat.

When questioned about Pete’s actions, Trump went to his now familiar first line of defence – ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ but then later said he had 100% confidence in Pete. Given Trump also stated he has lowered drug prices by 1500%, it is clear he doesn’t know what percentages are.

And that shouldn’t be Pete’s only concern. When pressed by a reporter on Air Force One, Trump said that while he had 2 billion and 3 cucumbers percent confidence in Pete, he personally would not have ordered a second strike, putting a subtle distance between Pete’s chances of surviving this catastrophe and his own. Because while Trump may be happy to see fishermen clinging to wreckage, he’s not about to cling to the potential wreckage of Pete’s career.

Slippery Pete has survived a number of controversies, including sexual assault allegations and his own mother claiming he mistreated women, and this latest incident may be no exception. Pete went from stating the accusation was fake news to someone else gave the order as quickly as he slaps an NDA on the women he allegedly mistreats.

But therein lies his potential undoing. The one law more important to the military than the Geneva convention is you never rat on a fellow soldier and Pete has done just that. So when Pete ‘I’m all whiskers and front teeth’ Hegseth makes his next mistake – and he will – he may find his fellow soldiers are no longer there to cover it up.

And now, we go live to our roving reporter Billy Beans, who thinks Christmas isn’t commercial enough. What have you got for us, Billy?

The Bank of England has warned of a sharp correction in the value of AI stock, meaning investments in AI will be corrected from ‘worth something’ to ‘Sorry, dear. We have to live in our car.’ 

And it is not just the Bank of England. The warning has also come from Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Sam Altman of ChatGPT and from the head of Goggle, which just floats around in a jar these days.

According to these experts, it is not certain when the AI bubble is going to burst, only that it will.

The financial system throws up these anomalies from time to time, largely because stock traders are so greedy, they make you sick.

There was the housing bubble, the dot.com bubble, even a tulip bubble, where the cost of a single tulip bulb inflated to such a degree that 17th century Dutch investors paid up to a £1 million pounds for one. That bubble burst when Holland woke up one day and thought – they’re just fucking flowers.

But AI isn’t tulips and the whole world economy is banking on that being true. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested based on the dream that AI will achieve something extraordinary, and one of the front runners in this race is Elon Musk’s Grok, an AI system that had to be taken offline when it started its very own Hitler fan club. Later, it had to be adjusted again when it began claiming Elon was the best at everything, including – as one Grok user discovered – that Elon was the best at drinking his own pee.

Desperate to show Grok had achieved something extraordinary, Elon appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast boasting Grok could soon roast guests at a party. That’s a billion dollars so a laptop can call you fat.

Like the 17th century Dutch tulip freaks, the danger arises when everyone wakes up to the idea that large language models like Grok or ChatGPT will only ever be good at one thing – using language well enough to pass for being human, something call centre staff have already achieved. 

Good reporting. Now we join Virginia Cluck-Bucket for another instalment of her series examining American culture called ‘Toilet World.’

Concerns are growing over Trump’s health, following repeated photos of him falling asleep during meetings, most recently during a cabinet meeting. As Cabinet members took turns to fluff the president into consciousness, he struggled to keep his eyes open. However, considering the fantastical lies put forth by the Cabinet about Trump’s achievements, they could easily have been misconstrued as bedtime stories, so it is hardly the president’s fault if Trumpy-Wumpy felt sleepy-weepy.

In an earlier press conference where Trump was announcing a price drop in weight loss drugs, he was caught sideways in his chair, eyes closed, dreaming that Melania still loved him. He only came to when a patient on the weight loss drug collapsed to the floor, and even then, he restricted himself to standing behind his desk while he waited for nursey to take him back to bed.

While the world desperately hopes he’s okay, it has forced the Whitehouse to persuade us we haven’t seen what we’ve clearly seen. Karoline Leavitt, Press Secretary and evidence the body doesn’t need a brain to survive, stated Trump had been examined and ‘everything evaluated is functioning within normal limits,’ immediately raising the question of what wasn’t evaluated.

But Trump also confirmed his rude health. According to him, the President’s physician Sean Barbabella claimed the test results were the best he had ever seen as a doctor, suggesting Barbabella has only ever worked on corpses dragged from the sea. Trump also aced the cognitive test, he said, boasting how easy it was to name the animals in the pictures, suggesting it wasn’t a test, but a children’s book he’d been given.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump’s doctor Dr Harold Bornstein admitted Trump had written his own medical report that was released to the media, including the line ‘if elected, Mr Trump will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.’

Trump’s second term has been characterised by his orange gas-lighting as he attempts to persuade the American public that grocery prices are down, that tariffs are working and he and Melania are just on a break. He spreads lies like bats spread Covid, and the idea Sleepy Don remains healthy is another porker, especially considering he is a 79-year old surviving on a diet of Big Macs and bitterness.

Thank you, Virginia.

And now we join guest reporter Thermal John, who once shot a man with an arrow. What have you got for us, Thermal?

And that has been the United State of News. I’ve been Johnson Hood. Good luck.

United State of News was written by Shaun Baines with guest writer Jack Docherty. It was performed by Shaun and Gillian Baines, Jack Docherty and the esteemed Alex Morrison.